The Psychology of Price

A new report out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business reports a direct correlation between price and pleasure. I would link this back to an earlier post I wrote about Magical Value in showing not only the correlation between price, but between a users satisfaction and what they believe the marketplace value is. If they believe that the product that they are purchasing and consuming is of greater of higher value and greater quality, consumers want to believe that they are evolved enough to appreciate that additional quality.

They did their study based on wine. In telling people that the bottle was more expensive, users reported experiencing additional pleasure. Now, overall that makes a lot of sense, but I think that the only criticism that I might have of their study is that it seems like they only measured the first bottle of wine. Because frankly, after a couple bottles, two-buck-chuck tastes pretty darn good.